...if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal." JFK

Saturday, December 08, 2007

There appears to be an unsatisfactory amount of information, at least to me, on the internets for general information about parasitic worms. In any case, I feel like writing about parasitic worms today.

Parasitic worms, or as we call them in the world of parasitology, parasitic helminths, are metazoan animals made up of three phyla: Platyhelminths or flatworms (flukes and tapeworms); Nematoda (roundworms) and the less well known Acanthocephala (thorny headed worms). Metazoan simply means they are members of the animal kingdom and are made up of many cells.

A fluke (trematode)

Parasitic worms (helminths) are a very diverse group of animals. Adult worms can range in size from just a few hundred microns up to 10 meters in length. In terms of sex, male and female reproductive organs can be in the same worm (flukes and tapeworms) or as individual male and female worms (roundworms and acanthocephalans). Some worms have no gut others have have a gut with a single opening (no anus), while others have guts with both a mouth and an anus.

Parasitic worms also have different types of life cycles. Those with a direct life cycle have only a single host. Those with an indirect life cycle utilize more than one host to complete their life cycle. In either case, the host in which sexual reproduction of the worm takes place is called the definitive host. Hosts in which development, growth or asexual reproduction takes place are called the intermediate host. Host to host transmission occurs via eggs or larvae. Eggs are usually ingested while larvae may be ingested or they can penetrate the skin.

A tapeworm (cestode)

As noted above, worms are classified into phyla and then further into classes. In the phylum Platyhelminthes we will only concern ourselves with the class Cestoda (tapeworms) and the class (subclass?) Digenea (flatworms or flukes). The phylum Nematoda consists of many different orders that we need not really be concerned with....they are all nematodes (roundworms).

Chautauqua County Judge Timothy J. Walker, acting Supreme Court Judge, ordered the State of NY to cease making tax payments on state lands because of the "jumbled approach" to the state land taxation (reported in Plattsburgh Press Republican). The order was stayed pending appeal.

Here is how this could specifically affect the Saranac Lake School District if the state didn't make payments:

n the Saranac Lake Central School District -- the largest in the state formed of seven towns over an area the size of Rhode Island -- the numbers are mind-boggling.

District business manager Mike Kilroy ran a what-if scenario.

Of the total $16 million school tax levy, $3.7 million or about 22 percent comes in the form of state tax payments.

"Here's how much the school tax rates would go up if the state didn't make any payments," Kilroy said, his calculator whirring in the background.

"Harrietstown would go from $9.07 to $11.60 (per thousand of assessed value); Brighton would go from $9.15 to $11.67; Franklin (town) would go from $12.35 to $15.80; Santa Clara would go from $7.94 to $10.12; North Elba would go from $8.13 to $10.40; St. Armand would go from $8.40 to $10.72; and Black Brook, which only has a few parcels in the district, would go from $7.94 to $10.11."

State land is clearly assessed at a lower value than privately owned land. This never did seem fair or logical to me. This is an especially important issue in the Adirondacks since the State of NY owns almost half of the park.

Friday, December 07, 2007

Besides being Pearl Harbor day, today is also the day that I defended my thesis..."A Comparative Genetic Approach to the Study of Host Resistance to Experimental Malaria". That was many years ago but still unforgettable.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

What has 2,540 words but only uses the word "Mormon" once? That would be Mitt's religion speech. Did he have a good reason for not mentioning his specific faith more often? He actually mentioned Islam more than LDS. Are there specific tenets of his faith that some suspicious voters should not know about? The entire text of Romney's speech can be found here. Here is one paragraph that just confuses the hell out me.

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

Do you really have to have religion to be truly free? Romney had to convince evangelical Christians that he is just like them. At least he said he would swear his oath on a Bible rather than the Book of Mormon. That should satisfy some evangelical Christians.

Mitt Romney will address his religious beliefs in a speech to be given this morning. I doubt he will talk about gods on other planets and humans becoming gods. When religious folk start talking about the nitty-gritty of their religious beliefs, the discussion can become problematic. For instance, it is my understanding that you cannot claim to be a Catholic without believing in transubstantiation. That can be a problem for some.

At the risk of the penalty of anathema, examine the belief of transubtantiation, "is the change of the substance of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ occurring in the Eucharist according to the teaching of some Christian Churches".

Jesus therefore said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. "He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. "For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. "He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. (John 6:53-56)

But is the belief in transubstantiation really any different from the belief that god was once a man on another planet who became a god? My question is....how can people so easily believe these religious concepts as facts....and not just facts based on faith but actual facts based on reason (without evidence of course). Yet these same people have problems with the "theory" of evolution which is based on reams of actual evidence and not just philosophical arguments.

S. 1943 is a bill to establish uniform standards for interrogation techniques applicable to individuals under the custody or physical control of the United States Government. This Bill is sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy and according to Govtracker.us, has no cosponsors. The Bill basically says that no one shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by sections 5-50 through 5-99 of the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations.

How is the Bill coming along in the US Senate? It was introduced on August 2nd, 2007. It's been refered to the Judiciary Comm. and as far as I can tell, there it sits. Aug 2, 2007: Read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. The Judiciary Comm. has a lot on it's plate, unfortunately S. 1943 may not be as important as S. 2046 "Text a tip act" or S. 1989 the "Pigford Claims Remedy Act".

Several weeks ago I emailed Sen. Schumer to express my disappointment with his vote supporting the appointment of Judge Michael B. Mukasey to the position of US Attorney General. Sen. Schumer must of gotten a ton of emails about this because today I received a long email from him attempting to explain his vote. Here it is:

Thank you for contacting me to express your opposition to the nomination of Judge Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general.

As you may know, I voted in favor of Judge Mukasey's nomination. I did so for one critical reason: the Department of Justice is a shambles and is in desperate need of a strong leader committed to depoliticizing the agency's operations.

The department has been devastated under the Bush administration. Outstanding United States attorneys have been dismissed without cause; career civil-rights lawyers have been driven out in droves; people appear to have been prosecuted for political reasons; young lawyers have been rejected because they were not conservative ideologues; and politics have been allowed to infect decision-making.

We now have the potential to improve this critical department. There is virtually universal agreement, even from those who opposed Judge Mukasey, that he would do a good job in turning the department around. Indeed, my colleagues who opposed his confirmation have gone out of their way to praise his character and qualifications. More importantly, Judge Mukasey has demonstrated his fidelity to the rule of law, saying that if he believed the president were violating the law he would resign.

My colleagues and I, and many others, spent a great deal of time and effort to expose the failings of Alberto Gonzales. I did not want to see those failures continued by the installation of a caretaker, acting Attorney General who would do the bidding of Vice President Cheney and his Chief of Staff David Addington instead of working to get the Justice Department back on track.

I understand and respect those who believe that Judge Mukasey's view on waterboarding should trump all other considerations. Like you, I believe that the cruel and inhumane technique of waterboarding is not only repugnant, but also illegal under current laws and conventions. I too found Judge Mukasey's refusal to classify waterboarding as a form of torture unsatisfactory. Therefore, I hope Congress will soon pass S.1943, a bill I am cosponsoring to explicitly ban the use of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. Judge Mukasey not only made clear to me that the president would have no legal authority to ignore such legislation, but also pledged to enforce such a law. Some say such a law is unnecessary because waterboarding is already illegal â€“ a view with which I fully agree. However, there appears to be enough dissention and confusion in the legal community, and within the White House, that a new law, which makes the illegality of waterboarding crystal clear, can only help.

Further, even if we don't pass a new anti-waterboarding law, on the issue of torture we would be better off with Judge Mukasey than with a caretaker. The Judge has stated that he would abide by a court or Office of Legal Counsel ruling against the practice. We could certainly not expect the same from a caretaker appointee who would be more likely to embrace the theory of the unitary executive.

Had we rejected Judge Mukasey, President Bush made clear his intention to install an acting, caretaker attorney general who could serve for the rest of his term without the advice and consent of the Senate. To accept such an unaccountable attorney general, I believe, would be to surrender the department to the Administration's extreme ideology and abandon the hope of instituting the many reforms called for by our investigation. I believe the rejection of Judge Mukasey would have been a symbolic victory in the short term, but it would have ultimately delayed reform at the Justice Department and, in all likelihood, caused more problems in the long run.

Indeed, it is my hope Judge Mukasey's first weeks as attorney general are an indicator of his service to come. Days after he took office, the Justice Department reopened an internal investigation into the administration's warrantless surveillance program, which had stalled for over a year under his predecessor. More recently, the recall of the controversial U.S. attorney for Minnesota, whose radical views and poor management were symbolic of how far the Justice Department had fallen, is a tremendous step towards dismantling the legacy of Attorney General Gonzales. While there is certainly more to do, it is my hope that Judge Mukasey will do what it takes to remove the stench of politics from the Justice Department.

Again, thank you for contacting me on this important issue. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can ever be of assistance to you on this or any other matter.

Sincerely,

Charles E. SchumerUnited States Senator

That's a very long letter to explain why someone who doesn't know whether waterboarding is illegal was appointed Attorney General.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Bush claims he was made aware of the NIE, that indicates Iran is not working towards nucler weapons, just last week. In August, he is told "we have some new information"...he wasn't told what the new information was.....and evidently Bush didn't ask what the new information was all about. He is famously incurious.

Either way, this guy is the biggest idiot to have ever served as the President of the USA.

“Are you telling me a president who is briefed every single morning, who is fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the United States government said they had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in ’03?”

one highly reliable intelligence community source I consulted immediately after Hadley spoke answered my question this way: “This is absolutely absurd. The NIE has been in substantially the form in which it was finally submitted for more than six months. The White House, and particularly Vice President Cheney, used every trick in the book to stop it from being finalized and issued. There was no last minute breakthrough that caused the issuance of the assessment.”

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains on hold, contradicting an assessment two years ago that Tehran was working inexorably toward building a bomb.

This NIE was completed a year ago. So all the Bush bluster about Iran and World War III was just that.....bluster. But it sure was a good reason to try to convince the rubes we needed to take military action on Iran.

This post is for the people who get refered to this blog when they Google "What does Adirondack Mean"? The explanation is taken from "History of the Adirondacks" by Alfred Donaldon (ISBN 0-916346-26-9).

Ad-i-ron'-dacks: The word means "tree-eaters," and was used by the Iroquis as an apithet of contempt and derision for their hereditary enemies, the Algonquins.

Donaldson also quotes from a paper by Professor J. Dyneley Prince, entitled "Some Forgotten Indian Place-Names in the Adirondacks" published in the "Journal of American Folk-lore" for 1900, pp. 123-128. Here is a bit of it:

The mountainous district known as the Adirondacks takes its name from a well-known Mohawk word, ratirontaks, "they eat trees" or "those who eat trees". This term is in regular use at the present day among the Mohawks at Caughnawauga, P.Q., and elsewhere, to denote the so-called Algonquin tribe who formerly had their headquarters at Oka, not far from Montreal.

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Romney will deliver a speech called "Faith in America" at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, on Thursday, outlining his religious beliefs and how they might impact his administration.

I have no idea why he is going to talk about religion. I found this youtube cartoon about mormonism. I'm a bit familiar with the teachings explained in the second half of the cartoon as I have been attempting to read the Book of Mormon. I believe the beliefs presented in the first part of the cartoon are based on Mormon Doctrine.